PERSONALITIES

John Negroponte Jr. was at home yesterday baby-sitting his three children and waiting for the Senate to vote on his stalled nomination to become ambassador to Mexico. He was U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 through 1986. His present appointment has been on hold for the past three months because of questions about his role in passing secret Reagan administration aid to the contras. His wife, Diana, an associate in the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker here, has also been waiting to phase out her job there.

She must resign if he is confirmed because the wife of an ambassador may not hold any paid job that might cause a conflict of interest. "One should never make concrete plans before the Senate has voted to approve a presidential appointment," she explained. "Foreign service wives learn that very early." If the confirmation doesn't come through, she joked, she hopes the law firm will keep her. In the event of confirmation, she said there were no special plans to celebrate. "We have waited quietly. I'll find something in the freezer."

Out and About

Veteran actress Lee Remick was recently at the National Institutes of Health, where she had been scheduled to have a kidney removed. A family friend said yesterday that the noted actress, who starred in such films as "Anatomy of a Murder," "The Days of Wine and Roses," "The Long, Hot Summer" and "The Omen" and numerous television miniseries, is in an undisclosed Boston hospital undergoing chemotherapy. The 53-year-old actress has a home in Cape Cod, where she is expected to return after her Boston treatments. Her daughter, Kate Colleran, is scheduled to marry New York stockbroker Tyke O'Hara on June 25 on Cape Cod ...

Look out America, the British Parliament is about to come to American television. The British House of Commons voted 293-69 Monday to allow TV coverage, and C-SPAN, the public affairs network that covers the House and the Senate full time, will begin airing portions of the proceedings in November. That should put pressure on American lawmakers if C-SPAN viewers seem to prefer the oratory of their British counterparts ...

Sergei Grigoryants, the founder of the Soviet journal Glasnost who was once imprisoned as a dissident, has received the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers 1989 Golden Pen of Freedom award. The 48-year-old publisher founded Glasnost in 1987; he was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp in 1983 for publishing Bulletin V, an underground newspaper on human rights. The Pen award, presented Monday in New Orleans, was created in 1961 to recognize the outstanding actions of an individual, group or institution in support of freedom of the press ...

Mary Hart, the leggy cohost of "Entertainment Tonight," will be at the Convention Center tonight where she will sing the national anthem for President and Barbara Bush at the 1989 President's Dinner ...

Mitch Snyder, advocate for the homeless, has had a movie and a television documentary made about him. Now he's going to be part of a music video. The rock group El DeBarge has written a new song, "Somebody Loves You," which is dedicated to the Housing Now movement and will be included in a fund-raising concert the group will hold here Oct. 6 at a yet-to-be-determined location. The concert is on the eve of the Housing Now march on Washington, aimed at creating affordable housing. El DeBarge is doing the video of "Somebody Loves You" and invited Snyder to appear in it. Carol Fennelly, Snyder's close associate in the Community for Creative Non-Violence, said Snyder has agreed to participate in the video, which she said will be all right as long as he doesn't try to sing ...

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